Stuart Hall, 1932–2014

Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born British academic and champion of cultural studies, has died, it has been reported. He was a founding editor of New Left Review in 1958 and, at Birmingham University in 1964, the co-creator of the first cultural studies programme. His writing discussed hegemony and language-use as operating within a framework of power, institutions and politics/economics. For Hall, culture was a ‘critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled’. In 2013 Hall was the subject of John Akomfrah’s critically lauded documentary The Stuart Hall Project.